As a former high school teacher, I know intimately how unpredictable the behavior of a human teenager can be. I’d often bang my head against my classroom door half laughing, half crying, at the end of a long day. No age group could make me so amused, excited, and utterly frustrated all at the same time. One minute my students and I would joke and converse like adults and I would marvel at their creativity, depth, and humor. Five minutes later I’d have to confiscate 20 bags of Fire Hot Cheetos and scold them for smearing dirty fingers all over my classroom walls like three-year-olds.  In short, those dang teenagers are a mystery. But did you know that in addition to being a behavioral anomaly, teenagers are also a scientific one?

Passive aggressive behavior is probably on most people’s list of annoying qualities in another person. Scratch that, passive aggressive behavior usually falls into the category of legit reasons to banish someone for your life. I have never been pro passive aggression, in fact, I get rather peeved when someone pulls the hot/cold routine on me. I think my thoughts on passive aggression and its unfailing ability to make any situation worse is probably shared by most of you. Over the past week or so I have posted on the complexities of friendship, especially girlfriendship, and many of you commented that the tendency for girls to engage in passive aggression was one of the number one reasons you did not pursue female friendships. I was totally on board with this popular sentiment until I realized that not only have I been acting all passive aggressive myself this week, but I was glad I had.

Though I can’t remember his name, I can still recall the face of the guest who whipped out a handful of Ziploc bags as a long ago Christmas party was winding down. “Do you mind if I take some of these cheese puffs home with me?” he half-asked, shoving the leftover snacks into a bag. “What about these tortilla chips?”

Too shocked to do anything but nod, my acquaintance left with a stash of snacks and a permanent place on my own personal Do Not Call list.

When I first started writing this piece, I figured it would be about not making a fool of yourself at the company holiday party. But the more I researched, the more it seemed that pretty much every business on the planet has cancelled their annual soirees. I get that you can’t lay off half your staff and then ply the other half with six-foot sandwiches and cheap booze, but I think a lot of companies are using this financial downturn as an excuse. Bah humbug!

Men understand us just as much as we understand them. This is not because women are particularly difficult to understand. Or because men are ridiculously complicated. It is because human beings—all of us—are complex. From babies to grandmas, none of us can be “figured out,” but there are some basic truths. Writer Tad Safran learned some things about the opposite sex from his two-year-old niece. I think they can also be applied to men. I could be wrong.

Who doesn’t like a good spanking? Turns out even your kid eventually will.  If that grosses you out—or explains some things—then a new report, which links childhood penalties with adult sexual behavior, will come as no surprise. Elizabeth Gershoff, an assistant professor of social work at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor who has reviewed almost a century’s worth of research on spanking, claims people “may internalize [spankings] to mean that in loving relationships sometimes there’s pain or physical aggression.” Although the effectiveness of raising a hand to discipline a child is still up for debate, as of a 2007 study, 85% of people claim to have been spanked. So let’s face it—all (well, most) of us need to be punished. [ USA Today]